IBD Editorials

Assassins In Arizona?

10/18/2010 06:54 PM ET

Border: If there's one word we shouldn't want to add to the U.S. lexicon, it's sicario, the Spanish word for contract killer. But with lawmen warning of sicarios now in Arizona, we may soon know that word  and worse.

With little to worry about in crossing the unguarded U.S. border, it was only a matter of time before cartel smugglers began fighting over the lucrative spoils themselves.

Last May 13, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned Arizona authorities that it had intelligence that 15 trained sicarios from Mexico's Sinaloa cartel were heading to Arizona, the Arizona Republic reported. The sicarios were sent to kill other criminals who steal their illegal cocaine and heroin "loads."

It means grisly desert massacre scenes like those in the 2007 film "No Country for Old Men" could become commonplace in the U.S.

Indeed, lawmen believe it's already happening here.

It's tempting to dismiss the sicarios here as simply criminals targeting other criminals. But it won't end there. It never does.

Young sicarios have a depraved indifference to human life and will eventually take their profession public, shooting up shopping malls, setting off car bombs, killing politicians, blowing up skyscrapers and downing airliners. It happened in Colombia when Medellin cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar recruited the first sicario armies in the 1980s. And it's repeating itself in Mexico today.

The result here will be scenes like those from another film, Colombia's "Nuestra Senora de los Sicarios," about a depraved, desensitized public that's indifferent to the bodies piling up around them and pretending to see nothing. That was Colombia in the 1990s.

If it happens here, it will be due to many federal failures.

First, federal authorities have effectively ceded U.S. sovereignty to cartels, declaring parts of Arizona off-limits to citizens and refusing to let local lawmen enter it on "environmental" concerns.

That's turning one-time smuggling corridors into killing fields.

Second, the feds deny there's a problem. The Arizona Republic reports that the DHS denied the accuracy of the intelligence from its own May memo. But the Pinal County Sheriff's Office says there are signs that a drug-related massacre happened in June.

Third, Arizona already makes a convenient target. Sicarios bolster their income with kidnappings, and Arizona already has the world's second-highest kidnapping rate. It bodes ill for the future.

Unless the federal government starts guarding our border and stops demonizing Arizona for fighting back, sicarios will be just one more unwelcome part of Latin America's drug war that we've imported here. If we do nothing to stop them, they will come.